Western Digital has just announced the My Passport SSD line of portable solid state hard drives. As you might expect, the major advantage of SSD-based portable storage is speed. This one connects with a USB Type-C port and is rated at up to 515 MB/s, although that hasn’t been benchmarked yet. The drives also support hardware, 256-bit AES encryption via their security software.
According to Best Buy, the 256GB model ($99.99 USD) is already sold out, but the 512GB model ($199.99) and the 1TB model ($399.99) are both still available for the 14th of April.
jg
jg
USB 3.0 (also known as
USB 3.0 (also known as SuperSpeed USB) has a maximum bandwidth rate of 5 gbps (gigabits per second). That translates to 640 MBps (megabytes per second).
So this is fatser than USB 2.0’s speed which is 480 megabits per second, or 60 MBps(megabytes per second). And this device it must be USB 3.1 Gen 1 by USB-IF’s standard with the USB 3.0 controller’s maximum of 640 MBps of bandwidth.
Here’s a windows 7 question, will it be seen as a “hard drive”, SSD or Spinning Rust, by the windows 7 OS and can it be used for windows System Image backups, because windows 7’s System Image backup will not backup to a thumb drive.
“and is rated at up to 515 MB/s”
Is that a read or write metric, and really it’s very disingenuous for the maker to not provide those read/write metrics in their informational copy. It not a bad read speed, if that is in fact the read speed quoted, but there needs to be that write speed listed bucause this may be good for system image backups that do not tie up one’s system as long as system image backups on spinning rust. But that write speed needs to at least be better than the fastest spinning rust for it to make sense for system image backup usage.
So maybe they will call USB 3.1 Gen 2 with the 10 Gigabits/s bandwidth: SuperDuperSpeed USB, for a bandwidth that’s 1280 MB/s(≈1.24 Gb/s).
“Is that a read or write
"Is that a read or write metric"
Yeah, the phrase "although that hasn't been benchmarked yet" was rewritten several times. I was trying to find a clever, concise way of saying that SSD "maximum speed" ratings are, typically, next to useless, but do so without being too harsh or, worse, looking like I'm calling them out. It very well could hit 500+ MB/s read and write under some tests, as, for instance, we measure the Samsung 850 EVO doing a couple of years ago.
No-one knows one way or the other until it's tested.
It does not even rate a
It does not even rate a mention if the maker has yet to list the Read/Write speeds that the maker most definitely has Knowledge of. Hence the “disingenuous” for a very disingenuous marketing tactic on the part of the maker of this device.
And “although that hasn’t been benchmarked yet” is no excuse for that maker/maker’s representative to put forward because the maker will have already tested the device’s read/write metrics, many times over, as part of the maker’s engineering/development process of that device.
Any consmer can not purchase this product while not having the even the very basic Essential Read/Write metrics for such a device. I hope that someone can optain a sample and run the benchmarks on this class of device because I’d like to see a windows 7 system Image backup benchmark as well as the other types of benchmarks that are done for devices lke this one.
I think that windows 10 now has that system Image backup option working, at least I think I read somewhere that windows System Image backup was available under windows 10.
My storage drives need to be
My storage drives need to be large on size not faster.